Beach Wi-Fi And Charging Stations

We stumbled across these in Westport, at Horseneck Beach.

You can lock on to their WiFi signal while you're at the beach. This is important, because you can waste a lot of data on a beach day. Also, it allows you to buy a cheap phone for beach use. No need for any phone cards, nor any need to have an overachieving wave hit your fancy new I-phone or whatever the kids are using these days.

You can also charge up your phone. I should have memorized this process better, but you use your credit card, lock your phone in the little charging station, and come back for it after X amount of recharge time.

Rather than wasting a power line that will almost certainly get destroyed by a nor'easter, they power it by what looks like a removable solar panel. They were confident enough in her sturdiness to have it out in late-April/early-May. While the solar-based charger power may be weak on cloudy/rainy days, I'd imagine that demand for beach WiFi would also be low on those days.

I don't do my beaching in Westport (although I will in the future, Horseneck Beach is charming), so I haven't field-tested this Bad Larry. I have no idea if the signal reaches very far, Energetic beaches could actually trot them out to where the people are and remove them when the seas are threatening. Horseneck Beach has them up by the snack bar.

It seems like a good idea to me. Charlie Baker has his name on it, so maybe it is exclusive to State beach reservations or some such stuff. Larger beaches may want more than one, to spread them out some and avoid massing the phone phreaks in one spot. 

I have no idea what one of these costs (Editor's Note: $96,500 bought a dozen of them), but it might be a nice investment for a town with a beach. 

Places that have these presently:

Artesani Playground and Wading Pool - Boston
Constitution Beach - Boston
Southwest Corridor Park - Boston
Castle Island - South Boston
Murphy Rink - South Boston
Nickerson State Park - Brewster
Lynch Family Skate Park - Cambridge
Nantasket Beach Reservation - Hull
Nahant Beach Reservation - Nahant
Wollaston Beach - Quincy
Salisbury Beach Reservation - Salisbury

Horseneck Beach Reservation - Westport

Horseneck Beach

We don't get out to Westport as much as we should, so we solved that problem by visiting Horseneck Beach.

Horseneck Beach is widely considered to be the best beach on the South Coast, and it is difficult to argue with someone making this claim. It's 800 acres, with 2 miles of barrier beach. 

In many ways, it serves the same dunes/sandy beach purpose that Duxbury serves on the South Shore, or that Truro serves on Cape Cod.

It's important that, to keep people's bare feet from suffering on searing white sand, they put down a nice strip of something even hotter. HNB loses points for this... but HNB has plenty of points to spare. I spent my whole time there walking around going "Damn, this is pretty." 

See? Sea.

Trampled dune fencing looks nice, but it's not serving the purpose it was put up for.  This has more of a "trampled by snow" than "trampled underfoot" look.

People as a whole aren't evil, and they don't trample dune grass on purpose. The  ones who do trample it usually don't know any better. If you make a path like this for them, they will use it and trample less beach grass. It took Duxbury much of my childhood to figure this out.

That point we took away earlier? Give it back, and then some, for "cool lifeguard house design." Two different buildings bearing the red cross, btw...

As a non-local, I'm not sure what purpose this building has. I thought it might be the snack bar, but they have a Seaside Cafe van parked there to feed the locals. It doesn't have the outdoor showers of the bath house I saw a bit west (see below). It must be the office or something.

They taste like chicken...

As you can see, the chemtrails already have those people there acting all passive and compliant.

Now, I'm feeling all passive and compliant.

Needing to walk onto the dunes in order to read the KEEP OFF THE DUNES sign sort of defeats the purpose, and is one of the things that a graduate of Dune Sign University knows instinctively. Westport played it cheap and didn't get a DSU grad. I'd take points away, but there is no such thing as DSU.

Yes, sometimes I take a picture of a cool rock, especially if my co-pilot is 10 years old.

If my memory were better or if I zoomed out a little more when shooting, I'd probably have an answer to the "Why did they fence off sand?" question.

Less touristy than Cape Cod, Westport seems to lack the urgency that the Cape has with Shoulder Season.

Every beach should have one of these, and I'll be writing an article about it soon enough. Westport people can skip that one, or read it and be like "Yup, we had that before he wrote about it."

Gotta be honest... the pricing isn't that bad with the captive audience factor. Try eating at Fenway for this money...

Lacking better adjectives, I'll just say "very Eastham."

Granted, I'm just a visitor, but Westport really ought to call the Beach Fencing Repair guy.

Can't do a beach article without the obligatory sand shot, player...

Picture of a picture, old school Horseneck Beach.

Again lacking the words, I'll just say that there is very much some Duxbury Beach West happening here...

Horseneck Beach parking rates

That's either floatsam or jetsam, not really sure.

If you shoot from right under it, it looks just like Truro.

I don't know how Horseneck Beach got the name, but it most likely has something to do with how she looks on a map. Let me check Wikipedia....

Nope.

"The name of the beach is believed to derive from the Algonquin word hassanegk, meaning "a house made of stone."

A two part lesson on dune vegetation, above and below. 

Let's all shower five men on a pole, eh? 

If you were wondering how they power the charging station, wonder no more.

A bit blurry, but not as tilted as my usual work.

I was having a fine time until the Allosaurus ran out of the dunes and started devouring beachcombers.

Al and I agree that Horseneck Beach is one of the best in the state.